Robert Paul Turcic passed away in June 2025. A model railroader formerly from Hooper, Utah, he shot mostly detail and roster shots of locomotives and freight cars for reference in building scale models. His photo collection was salvaged by Parker Christensen who donated it to the WCRM for digitization.
Active in the 1990s through the 2010s, he signed all of his photos as “Paul Turcic” so the collection is labeled as such. He focused on the dwindling Denver & Rio Grande Western and Southern Pacific locomotive fleets after the 1996 Union Pacific-Southern Pacific merger, as well as Utah shortlines like the Salt Lake City Southern, Utah Railway, and Utah Central Railway.
The collection can be viewed on the museum’s Flickr page HERE.
Two Southern Pacific freight trains meet at Lemay, Utah, on the Lucin Cutoff causeway in April 1980. Doug Harrop photograph, Western Crossroads Railway Museum collection.
The Western Crossroads Railway Museum is pleased to announce that we have received a donation of Doug Harrop’s black and white photographs from his son, Matt Harrop.
Doug Harrop was born in Huntsville, Utah, in 1940. He hired on to the Southern Pacific Railroad in Tucson, Arizona with the intention of becoming an executive in 1967. He graduated from SP’s management training program in 1968, entering professional service as assistant trainmaster to Trainmaster Larry Dubois in Bakersfield, California. After a decade of this work ending in San Francisco, California, he resigned from management and entered road service as a locomotive engineer based out of Ogden Utah in 1977. He stayed through the merger and retired from Union Pacific in 2003. He passed away on 24 March 2014.
The earliest photographs in this collection date to 1961, when Doug was serving a full time mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the upper New England region of the United States and Canada. There is a gap in his black and white photography while in California, at which time he apparently shot exclusively color slides. When he returned to Utah he resumed black and white photography, continuing with it long after his peers had switched to full color into the early 2000s.
Doug was a prolific author and many of these photographs have appeared in Trains Magazine, CTC Board, Pacific Rail News, Railfan & Railroad, John Signor’s books, and other publications, either to illustrate his own articles or to accompany articles written by others.
We are scanning the photographs and uploading them to the museum’s Flickr account.
A Union Pacific switch locomotive assembles the Desert Wind and Pioneer passenger trains on the night of May 15, 1983 at the Ogden Union Station. Doug Harrop photo, Western Crossroads Railway Museum collection.
We are pleased to announce that we recently received the donation of the H.L. Putnam Collection. Henry Lee Putnam was a machinist for the Denver & Rio Grande and Denver & Rio Grande Western railroads in Helper and Soldier Summit during the brief time that the terminal facilities were moved there. He retired in 1955. The collection was donated by his grandson David Putnam, to whom we are indebted for making these materials available.
The collection consists of H.L. Putnam’s training books on steam technology, 29 issues of the railroad’s employee magazine The Green Light, and three issues of Trains Magazine relating to Utah, including the May 1969 Golden Spike Centennial issue.
We have already begun digitizing portions of the collection, which can be found on our Archive.org page.
